JSTUN used for education (JSTUN)
By accident I figured out that the university of applied sciences in Dresden, Germany runs a website containing an overview and some deeper information in selected areas of STUN. The good thing is that the websites contains a discussion of my JSTUN implementation, on the other side the website is unfortunately in German. The author does not only describe how my implementation works in general, he also discusses selected parts of my source code. That is really cool! I like that. Hopefully, I will see more websites of this kind. ;-)

Regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 22:11 2006-03-29 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Captcha Support for Poster (General)
As you may have noticed, last night, I upgraded the blogging software I use (called Poster) to the latest release. During the upgrade, I was really pissed about the spammers polluting my nice blog with unwanted advertisements and nonsense. First of all, I deleted all the spam and secondly I decided to add captcha support to Poster so that all the spam bots will hopefully not be able to annotate my beautiful blog entries anymore. ;-) After 2 hours everything was implemented and tested. Okay, for the captcha image support I was inspired by another captcha project (I will release further details later) and the captcha integration is more a dirty hack than a smooth add-on. However, I already contacted the Poster maintainer to see if he wants the captcha support in the main source tree. So far, I have no answer. Hopefully he will add it (after I streamlined the code a little bit). It would be cool! I keep you updated ... stay tuned.

Cheers, Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 09:42 2006-03-29 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (1)

Could not sleep ... (General)
Tonight, I could not sleep. After a while liing awake in my bed I decided to get up and to add a PayPal donation button to the homepages of the GPL projects I am maintaining (namely "JSTUN" and "Safe"). It is pretty easy to add such a button. So, lets see how much money the projects will earn through these buttons. I will keep you informed.

I will give it another try: hopefully, I am now tired enough to fall asleep ...

Good night,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 02:08 2006-03-27 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (1)

FOSDEM (General)
I forgot to tell you: I have been attending the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting) held in Bruessel from 25th to 26th February 2006. It was very informative and great fun. I assume, I saw nearly 99,9% of Bruessel during our attempt to find the way to the hotel. We (Thomas Butter and I) had no adequate maps and even worse, a wrong address of the hotel. However, eventually, we reached the hotel with a delay of 3 hours. *grr*
Here you will find the photos we took in an unsorted way.

Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:49 2006-03-21 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

Improved website at work ... (General)
... two days ago, I improved my website at work. A short CV has been added as well as links to my personal publications and my advised publications. I think it is worth a click ... click here ... enjoy ...

Greetings,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:24 2006-03-17 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

New JSTUN version released (JSTUN)
Today, Thomas Butter, a friend and colleague of mine, decided to use my STUN implementation (called JSTUN) on our common project at work. JSTUN is implemented in Java and uses a lot of Java 5 dependent features. One of the reasons, why I implemented JSTUN, has been to learn the new Java 5 features. The demo client for our common project, however, is implemented in a Java sub-dialect called J2ME CDC. J2ME CDC has been developed to run on cell phones and personal digital agents, hence it does not support all features of Java 5. Unfortunately, I have not told Thomas that JSTUN relies on many Java 5 features. So, as soon as he tried to add JSTUN to our demo client he faced over 200 compiler errors. Thomas spent a few hours to get rid of the Java 5 dependent features and since tonight the code compiles. During his downgrading work, Thomas found a serious bug in the error-code handling and two minor exception handling flaws. I fixed the bugs and improved the code and after the junit tests have been passed without any errors I uploaded the files to my JSTUN website. Feel free to test the latest version of JSTUN ... ;-)

Cheers, Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:09 2006-03-17 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)

New "Safe" version released (MobileKnox / Safe)
Last Friday, I released a new version of "Safe". As you might know, "Safe" is a password management midlet. It uses only one root password to provide access to the data stored inside the program. The idea is, that the data inside "Safe" contains login-names, passwords and other sensible information that is protected by one difficult to guess password. Before I used "Safe", I reused the same password for many accounts and even worse, I selected easy to remember (and hence often easy to guess) passwords. With "Safe" I can select difficult to remember passwords because I do not have to remember them anymore! ;-)

The first public release was available in 2001. However, since then I added a few features and once in a while I published a new version. So, the latest release is 1.0.3. Go and check it out. ;-)

Cheers, Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 15:44 2006-03-05 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)